Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [85]
In Guatemala, similarly, during 1984 and 1985, and for many years before, the actions of the armed forces against alleged subversives was entirely outside the rule of law. Thousands were seized, tortured, and killed without warrant and without any individual right to hearing or trial. As in El Salvador, mutilation and exposure of the tortured bodies became commonplace in the late 1970s and the 1980s.16 The courts were dominated by the military, as the latter would simply not execute or obey a court order of which they disapproved, and the judges were not inclined to challenge the military for reasons of dependency or fear. Even Viscount Colville of Culross, the special rapporteur of the UN General Assembly who has been a notorious apologist for the Guatemalan regime, after pointing out that over eighty members of the judiciary, court staff, and legal profession had been murdered in the early 1980s and that many others were threatened, says that “Such events make their mark and cannot quickly be mitigated.”17 Two illustrations of the lack of court autonomy may be noted here: in May 1983, Ricardo Sagastume Vidaure, then president of the supreme court, was simply removed by military order for attempting to bring military personnel under the jurisdiction of the legal system.18 On July 19, 1984, Colonel Djalmi Domínguez, head of public relations for the army, told the newspaper Prensa Libre that the army wouldn’t tolerate its members being taken to court on any charges.19
In the early 1980s, following the mass killings and village destruction of 1980–83, vast numbers of peasants were resettled in “model villages” and other places under army control, and over 800,000 males were made obligatory members of civil patrols with military functions under close army surveillance. According to the British parliamentary group that visited Guatemala in 1984, “The civilian patrol system is implemented by terror, and designed also to sow terror . . . People who do anything out of the ordinary come under immediate suspicion and are taken by the patrols to the army’s destacamiento. Interrogation will be done by the army, but the killing of murdered suspects [is] often by the civilian patrols.”20 Bishops Taylor and O’Brien, representing the Roman Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of Scotland and England-Wales respectively, reported after their visit to Guatemala in 1984 that
The civilian population is under almost total control by a heavy army and police presence throughout the country, which we were able to observe. There is also a nationwide network of civil defense patrols, military commissioners and informers, and “model villages” serving in some cases as internment camps for the Indian population from the areas of conflict. Much of Guatemala resembles a country under military occupation. One of our informants summed up the situation by saying that the military had established a system of “structural control.”21
The InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights, following an onsite visit in May 1985, also found that freedom of speech and assembly did not exist in Guatemala:
The right of assembly and freedom of association, considered in Articles 15 and 16 of the American Convention, are also restricted and curtailed, because existing security measures in the Development Poles and the strict supervision of the Civil Defense Patrols inhibit residents from taking part in any social, ideological, cultural or other assemblies or associations. All such meetings, when they do occur, are subject to surveillance, supervision and control by the authorities, so they do not enjoy the freedom implied by such rights.22
Public demonstrations